The present disclosure relates to information processing apparatuses, mobile terminals, and information processing systems and particularly relates to a technique for presenting information about an information processing apparatus to a user.
Recently, information processing apparatuses such as image forming apparatuses are becoming increasingly complex, so that the amount of information about each information processing apparatus, including manual information indicating various operations to be performed by a user, is becoming huge. It takes much time and effort for the user to acquire a desired piece of information from among such a huge amount of information, which is cumbersome. Therefore, it is important to appropriately present a piece of information desired by the user.
Conventionally, a technique for presenting a piece of information desired by a user from among information about information processing apparatuses is known. In such conventional technique, for example, an image forming apparatus has a bar code indicating an apparatus ID thereof and attached thereto. Furthermore, this image forming apparatus sends to a server a piece of status information indicating the status of the apparatus itself. Moreover, when a mobile terminal reads the apparatus ID indicated by the bar code and sends the apparatus ID to the server, the server identifies, from among respective pieces of status information on a plurality of image forming apparatuses stored in the server, a piece of status information on the image forming apparatus corresponding to the received apparatus ID and sends to the mobile terminal a piece of procedure display information (manual information) relating to the identified piece of status information. The mobile terminal displays the piece of procedure display information sent from the server. Thus, the user can know an operation procedure to be taken by the user in a current status of the image forming apparatus, by a simple operation of allowing the mobile terminal to read the bar code attached to the image forming apparatus.